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A strike among Deutsche Telekom employees has widened with about 15,000 staff now going on strike across Germany, unions have said. Workers began walking out on Friday, angry at plans to move many of them from its fixed-line business, T-Com, into lower-paying subsidiaries. It is the firm's first major industrial dispute since it was privatized. The services union Verdi says that call centres, technical support and cable installation have been hit. Deutsche Telekom has appealed to the union not to disrupt next week's G8 summit being held in Heiligendamm in the north of the country.